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Socialist Resistance : SR46 - Summer 2007
Debate: After Blair...Why socialists should be in the Labour Party
The failure of John McDonnell’s Labour Party leadership challenge even to get as far as the ballot paper represents a new low water mark for the power and influence of the Labour Left. But the situation poses challenges also for the building of any new left wing alternative to Blairism, and has highlighted the weaknesses of Respect, as sections of the trade union and Labour left begin to regroup forces without abandoning their conception of “reclaiming Labour”. A recent Socialist Resistance London forum took up this issue, in the form of this debate between Alan Thornett from SR, and Simon Deville, who spoke from Labour Left Briefing. The Labour Party leadership has moved a long way to the right implementing a programme of counter-reforms that the Tories under Thatcher couldn’t. At the same time the left is a pale shadow of its height in the 1980s. Some argue that this demonstrates the need for a new left party. I would argue that this is based on both a wrong assessment of the current political period, and a wrong strategic orientation that can only serve to further marginalise the left from the mainstream of the working class. The central problem with this argument is that it has no explanation as to how and why Blair has been able to push the Labour Party so far to the right with so little opposition either inside or outside the party - and it shows no understanding of the real scale of the problem we face. Overall, people who have become disillusioned with New Labour have not gone on the streets on mass protest but have tended to drop out and become less political. No far left group has recruited even a significant minority of the 200,000 people who have left the Labour Party since 1997. Most people are opposed to privatisation but this has not translated into either a strike wave or even a mass campaign against the continued privatisation of health, education or housing. Many might not like what New Labour is doing, but this doesn’t mean they have drawn any radical conclusions from this. The anti-war movement is a dramatic exception, but even here, the anti-war movement’s absolute peak was on the eve of war when millions of people believed that their collective activity could actually stop the war. The anti-war movement has made an impact on class consciousness, but it hasn’t seen the movement find an organisational expression on a national scale. Aside from those disillusioned with politics, much of the left ignores the fact that there is a significant section of the population that is reasonably happy with the Blair government. Blair has after all won three elections in a row. Ten years of economic stability, a continued growth in property prices and near full-employment all mean that a lot of people have done quite nicely under Blair, albeit at the expense of a growth in inequality unheard of under a Labour Government. The legacy of the defeat of the miners has massively undermined class confidence and combativity, creating low levels of strikes and struggles and convincing large numbers of working class people that collective struggles cannot help to win reforms or improve their immediate situation. The rightward drift of Labour is merely a reflection of a rightward drift in the trade unions and elsewhere, and can’t be resolved simply by leaving the Labour Party. The votes of the trade union leaders have rescued Blair time and again. The “big four” unions still hold decisive sway within the Labour Party - Blair would have gone years ago if they had forced him out. The mainstream trade union leaders have deluded themselves - despite all the evidence - that they somehow have influence on Blair by negotiating behind the scenes. Those radical unions that have left or been expelled from the Labour Party have not gone on to form a new party but have strengthened the hand of the right wing unions. We are left with a very complex and in many ways contradictory situation, in which the key task for socialists should be finding ways of patiently rebuilding the labour movement and confidence of the class, of finding ways of resisting privatisation and the neoliberal offensive and most importantly of winning some victories that demonstrate the importance of collective struggles. In order to do this we must be firmly rooted inside the mainstream of the working class movement and develop ways of relating to the political centre and mobilising the class as a whole. Launching a radical, left wing party will only serve to pull together some of the best working class activists and isolate them still further from the rest of the class. Simply asserting as some do, that workers are angry and straining to be let off the leash by the bureaucracy misunderstands the current situation. Calling on the formation of an ideological-based party that will then somehow win the working class over to it misunderstands how politics work and will ensure that socialists have even less influence on the mainstream of the class than they have at the moment. There is an obvious appeal to working only with people you are broadly in agreement with, but if socialists are to make any significant impact they will need to get their hands dirty and work with the broad mass of the working class, often on terms that we do not choose.
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Simon Deville - Labour Left Briefing